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Glass-jawed Phil Scott, onetime British heavyweight champion, was discovered deep in London rubble, heading a squad of wardens digging out a bombed air-raid shelter. Puffed Fainting Phil as he leaned for a moment on his shovel: "And I used to think boxing was hard work."
Pittsburgh's Variety Club, orphan-succoring organization (started twelve years ago after an actor found a baby at a local theatre), feted a ten-month-old foundling, named him Joe E. Brown. On hand for the festivities, shovel-mouthed Comic Brown bounced the baby on his knee, talked of adopting him (though he had five of his own).
Elected King of Ak-Sar-Ben ("Nebraska" backwards) at Omaha's fall festival was bald, bulging William Martin Jeffers, 50 years ago a Union Pacific roundhouse callboy, since 1937 Union Pacific's president.
In Burlington, N. J., Etiquettical Emily Post made a political speech. Conceding President Roosevelt "a beautiful radio voice and social charm," she nevertheless raised her cultivated accents for tousled, frog-hoarse Candidate Wendell Willkie.
Pink-cheeked, bushy-browed Maestro Walter Damrosch, 78, built a baton-swinging cardboard effigy of Wendell Willkie at his Manhattan house, summoned musicians to see it. Putting politics before mythology, he crowed: "We are going to elect Willkie the conductor of 130,000,000 people for four years. ... He is playing the music from Wagner's opera Siegfried, in which Siegfried comes to awaken Brünnehilde, who has been asleep for eight years."